Instead of sublimity on a physical scale, maeve impresses on the technological scale; even its debugging mode is a work of display art (see Figure 2).

March + April 2010

interactions

sole object of interest in a large public room that is dark and illuminated by screens. Like its cinematic forebear, maeve dominates the room, reducing its users to silhouettes and shadows. Participants are most visible and present when they are interacting with maeve.

Maeve allows for no learn-
ing curve; users cannot take
it home and get to know it at
their own pace. New users
are facing a technology with
the aesthetic stylings of the
future; users are positioned as
if they were in maeve’s past and
needed to catch up. As we have
suggested, to use maeve is to
be onstage: One’s interactions
on the table are projected on
an even larger screen placed on
a wall; they become visible to
strangers from an even greater
distance. Maeve thus ampli-
fies the perceptual domination
of the movie theater with a
cognitive one; this advanced
and futuristic software system
turns a private practice into a
public performance.

Discussion

What we have done so far is to apply three different perspectives to a common point of departure, and it is clear that maeve can be understood in quite different ways depending on who is doing the criticism. Does that mean that everything is up in the air, that it is all a matter of taste? What would looking at a demo and writing down what you thought of it have to do with the aim of nurturing interaction design knowledge?

The point is that our perspectives are relevant for pushing the state of the art in the field